Warm Weather Queens Laying ?

[LT]

Anyone else in NC notice queens laying? Mine are laying heavily. Any ideas? Anyone ever split in January or Febuary?

[shughes]

mine are still laying and I still have drones flying in most of my hives.

[AstroBee]

Yesterday I only checked the brood nest of one of my hives. Given that it has been so mild I was a bit surprised to find no brood at all. The queen was present, lots of bees, no drones, no mites, lots of stores, and really warm temps. I expected to see at least a small patch of brood. I'm really not concerned as these are NWC and quite frugal.

[tecumseh]

LT ask:
Anyone ever split in January or Febuary?

tecumseh replies:
maybe in Florida or souther CA yes in NC I would suspect no. take a quick peek in the hives in jan-feb and tell me just how many MATURE drones you have at that time. typically the earliest I begin to see drones here in numbers is early march... to this add two to three weeks for maturation.

this does not to suggest that you couldn't buy mated queens from Hawaii and still split but rearing cells and getting some acceptable level of mating accomplished would seem to me to be questionable.

[Robert Hawkins]

Such serious problems. Y'all have my sympathy. 19 degrees outside now.

Hawk

[yoyo]

I have not been into my hives since about october. I do not want them to expend energy and eat valuable stores. I have one hive that has not stopped bring in pollen and there are still small drones flying in and out. I did not see that happening on the other two hives. The small swarm I have been babying since July is still about the same size. I have tried Mountaincamps feeding habits of putting a jar of syrup un the topbars, took about a month for them to take it. Now I have put some pollen sub. and some dry sugar on a paper towel. They are eating the pollen sub, but not so much of the dry sugar. They cleaned up what was actually spilled onto the topbars, but not crawling on the paper towel for it.H ow does the song go,,"IF we make it thru December, everythings gonna be allright I know". (Merle Haggard for you city boys) There has only been about 4 days that the weather prevented flight. Today's forcast , high 70s. ;) How about some RAIN weatherman?????

[Will]

Looked at bees this past weekend, bees were flying like it was spring. Anyone ever seen white wax in December? I hadn't until this past weekend. 4-6 frames of brood. Queen cups. One capped queen cell. I've never checked hives in December. Bees had already shutdown now they're brooding back up. Didn't see any flying drones. Only a few capped drone cells. I'm game for this discussion.

[Panhandle Bee man]

I would wait until mid-January to make this kind of decsion. Winter sometimes takes awhile to develop. I know my wife wants me to turn the AC back on, however I refuse. Watching the weather channel, I see that the records temps will be gone by this weekend.

If you do decide to make January splits, Gus Rouse at Kona queens in Hawaii usually has queens in January. I make mine up with a frame of Honey, full frame of Brood, frame of bees, and at least one empty drawn frame. These splits will build up rapidly, and be strong singles by mid April. Sometimes if there is a decent flow on they will be ready to swarm by then also. I also do not feed these splits until they are well established ie.. 2-3 frames of brood.

One word of caution, the drought is forcasted to continue for at least another year, so you may end up doing a lot of feeding.

[Lanier74]

I am in NC also and with this being my first year with bees I really did not know what to expect but my bees have been very active, almost to the point of what they were in mid summer. I checked about 2 weeks ago and had nearly a frame full of brood and eggs and this week I had a large hatch just come out. I did not know if this was normal for December or just brought on due to this weird weather. I am guessing from others post that this is not the norm though. I am also interested in when i would be able to split my hive and if it will harm the honey crop next year if I split them but I guess that is another tread all together.